01 October 2009

Tulips, Water, Ash by Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

Tulips, Water, Ash,
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s first collection and the winner of the 2009
Morse Poetry Prize, achieves the rare and difficult feat of arcing
through the dull rituals of everyday life to the most profound questions
about being, finding meaning in both realms. In these carefully
wrought, clean poems, Stonestreet examines and illuminates both the
objects of daily existence – “the mailbox, the toaster, the dentist
office” – and the deepest questions a human being can posit about their
existence – why am I here, and what is my place in the universe?
The poem which starts the collection, “De Profundis,” beautifully sets
Stonestreet’s agenda by questioning the worth and meaning of daily life –
“the middle, the soft / chewy center of here” -- and calling for some
experience of elsewhere, of more, of God in the midst of minutiae: “Oh,
lord. Remember // us, here: the soft warm milky middle, / its erasing
breath, its easy arms.”

The poems in part
one present a difficult problem: how we, as human beings, long for
transcendence, but are nonetheless mired in the minutiae of our lives.
In “View from the Headlands,” Stonestreet provides a view of life as
cluttered by necessarily rote. Human beings are, essentially, trapped;
the possibility of transcendence has been ruined by the stale steps one
must take every day for survival: “The longer I know it, my husband says, this place, / the worse I know it is—the
ruined, // the once.” The poem ends, however, on a note of hope:
Stonestreet sees that “[t]he moon hung, or was tethered, low in its
cradle,” thereby questioning whether this is an actual trap or merely a
trick of perception.

Stonestreet picks
up this theme again in “Jars,” in which she presents the possibility
that even in — or by — our daily lives, we can be transformed, but that
we are resistant to this: “What did I think / would happen? We were
transformed, / and obstinate.” In “Potential,” Stonestreet relates this
to the difficulty of escaping routine, or, rather, perceiving the
routine in another way: “No getting away from the world, at least for
now: even on the good days / it’s wash and backwash [...] Each discarded
bottle an egg dream, a push to the next / and next.” Even the smallest
and most seemingly useless object, then, contains within it the
potential for transformation, like an egg contains its yolk; however, we
merely discard and push things away.

Stonestreet
suggests, in “Painting the Existent,” that this is due to the brute
human tendency to believe that the other is better, the “there so
compelling” — that only through escape will we seek release, salvation
from ourselves, or what we have made of ourselves. Perception, then, is
the essence of the problem, as Stonestreet’s “Thought Experiment”
suggests:

See:Yesterday you met me at the train. Next yearis a leap year. All our presentspent elsewhere, a mirror held over the shoulderand a smaller one, fogged, close to the eye.

The following
poems tackle the parts of life which should allow for some kind of
transcendence: sexuality, the power to join two being into one, and
reproduction, the power to create another human being. Here, Stonestreet
again posits the possibility that perception is the problem, that,
through being caught up in the dailiness of life, we see even these
aspects of human existence as routine. In “Married Sex,” Stonestreet
meditates on what sex could be:

that lostnessyou’d once do anything for:to be madenothing again, perfectnot-being —

Sexuality has the
potential to take us outside of ourselves and create a moment of
“perfection;” however, by making sexuality routine, we drastically
change our perception: “Now you are something else: / not not
[...] / Flush all the time / with the seeing.” What we see, however,
removes the possibility of release. Even the power to create new life is
reduced, not glorified as it once was in the body of Persephone, who,
in “Persephone at 13,”

can swim in and through, tail flicking, down into the earth of her own flesh, becoming in her descent a cell, an electron, small thing spinning in a great void.

In the classroom,
Stonestreet learns of her body and its great capacities through watching
fish which the teacher presents as expendable, as nothings, “Dime a
dozen, those depths, those five / red jewels. All the girls are doing it. Dark matter / richer than loam, its loping song— pull of away, of in.”
As these lines suggest, there is still the promise of transcendence, if
only through the desire for extremity, a moment to jog one from
routine, as “Catapult” illustrates:

[...] Nights

we tried for momentum, some catapultof desire that could lift us out of one lifeand into the next [...]

[...] Plotted escape from somethingnot so bad, that is, intolerable.

The poems which
follow offer a kind of wistful hope by working through the problems of
perception. In “From Then,” Stonestreet suggests that alternate ways of
perceiving the world — through, for instance, poetry — can offer a
path to release, however limited it may be. Poetry, here, acts as divine
inspiration, a ladder up which — or down which — one can escape from
the routine of “dirty linoleum. One shoe squeaking / against the other.”
Poetry becomes the intersection of the divine and the ordinary, through
which Stonestreet “held the pearl. I slipped back down / through a hole
in the net.” This is because the person — the self — is not entirely
present in the moment of creation; rather, poetry comes through the
person, who must in some sense become other than their self. “We’re used / by sweetness—”
suggests a solution in blankness, a moment when the self is not so
concerned with the self and transcends the limits of daily, earthly
life:

Use me then, take me humming and buzzing down into hallelujah blankness— [...] that one moment of sweet forgiving nothing-elseness. That thing we’re made for.

In part II,
Stonestreet moves from seeking a solution in the self and the body to
examining the very laws of space itself: its elements and its particles,
its universes, all tending to the left, the right, the irregular, and
the strange, as do human beings. In “Dark Matter,” Stonestreet explores
the great mystery of what cannot be seen, seeking a definition and
therefore, perhaps, a solution, as though, by naming, she can lay claim
to the mystery and therefore gain a sense of agency and control over it:
“It is only the space between stars.” Stonestreet links the laws of the
universe at large with the laws of men:

—everything now is farther but gets there faster: light in the wires, your hand as it lifts toward your face, more distant by an atom than the day before.

“The Anthropic
Principle” turns again to the idea of perception, borrowing a
cosmological principle circling around the fact that human are rational,
and therefore any other universe that humans, or rational beings, could
occupy must be a universe like this one:

The cosmologist says, We hope that we don’t have to resort to this solution.

The cheat, the lie, the truth: Orion, for example, is therebecause you are there to see it.

But it is one way out.

The way out, in
other words, is through granting perception the ultimate power by
believing that the very universe exists because we name it into
existence. The human being, therefore, is of essential importance, and
this transcends not only beyond the dailiness of our everyday life, but
the boundaries of earth and earthly life in general:

You are there, and how long you have not been there, how long it has been leading up to this (mismatched and unreal though it is, though it will be still)— Open your view.

Open. Flooding in like stars,everything, with its hands and its eyes.

In “Double Helix,”
Stonestreet turns again to the human realm and suggests that this kind
of naming, this kind of communion, is as natural to human beings as our
very bodies themselves, as our very bodies function in such a manner:

Our organs work in
this rhythm to catch sensory experience, and the human mind works along
to carry it. We are made, then, of perception, which is itself
transcendence. In “Super Baby Jumbo Prawn,” Stonestreet makes clear that
the beauty of life is in the moments when we don’t seek extremity, in
those quiet moment in which we can sit back and simply see: “Some days
it’s enough, / sitting in the car eating lunch, / watching surfers tempt
the waves.”

We are our perceptions, and we are our memories,
and thus we are also our inconstant existences, our routines and our
routine miseries; we are “all the buckets, dug out / by their contents, made
/ of their burdens.” Therefore, it is through our tragedies and our
inconsistencies – both small and large, common and grand – that we find
possibility, that we gain the ability to reflect back, be illuminated,
shine, as in “Alluvial:” “Here, now: the compound, the rough. Something
mars / the surface, lets itself in.” The important thing, recognized
both by the poets and scientists, is that one changes by letting this
illumination into one’s life, as in “Light as the Only Constant in the
Universe:”

What is illuminated is what is reflective, even a little bit—roughed-up enough to grab onto, send

something back.

In “Etymology of
Lost,” the book’s final poem, Stonestreet turns to tragedy: “And now
here I’m supposed / to detail something even worse [...] /Body in the
water, pins on a map.” After great tragedy, perception alters, and it is
exactly the small, routine things which matter, and which give us most
the ability to be illuminated, and therefore luminous: “And then we went
out for kung pao tofu, and home to bed, / and I kissed my son on his
head and sang to him, // first the song about the angels and then the
one about the sky.”

***

Emma Bolden’s chapbooks include How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press), The Mariner’s Wife (Finishing Line Press), and The Sad Epistles (Dancing
Girl Press). She was a semi-finalist for the Perugia Press Book Prize
and a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First
Book Prize and for a Ruth Lily Fellowship. She teaches at Georgetown
College and is poetry editor of Georgetown Review.